20 in their 20s

Kasey Gandham, 24

Co-founder,
Packback

Packback Books could have been the most interesting business plan at Illinois State University that no one ever heard of. But then Mike Shannon, a plucky business major with nothing to lose, cold-called the president of one of the top textbook companies and pitched him on the idea of renting digital versions of his books.

It worked, and Packback was in business, renting digital textbooks for $5 a day. It's an attractive proposition for students already spending hundreds of dollars on books who might need a particular text to write a single report. Since its launch in 2011, Chicago-based Packback has signed up 10 publishers and is available on 70 campuses.

"The single thing that differentiates them is astonishing perseverance," says Howard Tullman, CEO of Chicago tech incubator 1871. He's also an investor in Packback via his venture fund, G2T3V. "It's a hard slog, campus by campus, publisher by publisher. These are two guys who are going to do whatever it takes to get it done."

Since winning their college business-plan competition in 2011, Shannon and co-founder Kasey Gandham have appeared on the ABC show "Shark Tank," signing up Mark Cuban as an investor.

Shannon, who grew up in Elmhurst, and Gandham, who came to ISU from upstate New York, met when they helped launch a business fraternity with eventual Packback co-founders Nick Currier, head of finance, and Jessica Tenuta, head of design. They zeroed in on the $8 billion textbook industry because of what they saw as its inefficiency and lack of innovation.

Gandham, president and chief operating officer, and Shannon, CEO, are an unlikely pair. Cut from his high school basketball team, Shannon spent seven years as a ball boy for the Chicago Bulls and writes rap music in his spare time. Gandham, a standout high jumper, came to the Chicago suburbs to get his grades up after high school to improve his chances of getting into an Ivy League school. Though he got accepted to Cornell University and Dartmouth College, he went to ISU.

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